


Facing Your Fear

by jideni3, nineofwords



Series: Orientations & Triangulations [2]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Language, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Imprisonment, M/M, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-23 02:25:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11393439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jideni3/pseuds/jideni3, https://archiveofourown.org/users/nineofwords/pseuds/nineofwords
Summary: Three seekers do about as well as you’d expect trying to get by in a hostile, functionist world.





	Facing Your Fear

**1984**

 

**_Primary awareness at 82%. Limb autonomy initiated._ **

**_Primary awareness at 89%. Limb autonomy at 95%. Spatial subroutines initiated. Weather subroutines initiated. Light level analysis subroutines initiated._ **

**_Primary awareness at 91%. Limb autonomy functional. Spatial and weather subroutines functional. Light level analysis subroutines functional. Traffic analysis subroutines initiated._ **

_UV light minimal, movement detected beyond ten meters along x axis, right angles everywhere, walls tight, too tight and close, not enough room to move, not, no--_

**_Primary awareness at 96%. Traffic analysis subroutines functional. Teleportation subroutines initiated. WARNING: PRIMARY FUEL RESERVES AT 7%_ **

_NORMAL that’s normal, this is Normal, numerically inelegant but ultimately unavoidable, and TC can--_

_TC can--?_

_TC?_

**_Primary awareness at 100%. Teleportation subroutines at 100%. WARNING: PRIMARY FUEL RESERVES AT 6.9992%. STASIS IN ONE KILOSECOND._ **

_Where is … TC?_

Skywarp slowly came online, his optics bleary. His systems were screaming at him that his fuel levels were devastatingly low. That wasn’t new.

As he mechanically reached for the energon cube that he knew would be on his nightstand, he wondered why this wasn’t new. That was bad, wasn’t it?

The cube wasn’t there.

He struggled to his feet, fumbling around for a cube that would keep him from sliding into stasis and wiping out all the trouble he’d gone through to wake up, which he finally found one on the desk underneath one of the datapads TC had sworn he was going to “publish soon, definitely.” He downed that and his secondary systems slowly started coming back online and he could remember where they kept their private stock. It took a few more cubes for him to recall why there were so few, to remember why there hadn’t been a cube on his bedside table.

Why his bed was empty.

He leaned out of the bedroom and found Starscream passed out on the couch they had in their sitting room. They actually had a sitting room. He knew that this was significant. Even more significant was Starscream, sprawled unceremoniously on the couch, mouth half open, paint scratches and oozing armor breaks and nasty-looking dents riddling his frame.

Skywarp looked away, upset. He hated seeing Starscream like this, regardless of how Starscream could get. TC said it was alright, and maybe it was, but it _felt_ wrong in a way that stood out from the wrongness of other things, stood out in a way that made Skywarp want to hurt something.

The small, everpresent box of streaming numbers dedicated to monitoring TC’s systems brightened and sped up on Skywarp’s HUD, indicating TC’s return to consciousness. The box dutifully reported that TC’s  fuel levels were low, (stupid Autobots, probably depriving him like the cheapskate lowlifes they were) and his peripheral processing systems were unusually slow to boot back up, perhaps the result of low energy or sedation. He couldn’t communicate with TC, not that he would. TC didn’t like talking first thing in the morning. They got so little quiet anymore that Skywarp didn’t mind respecting that. Not that Skywarp often had very much to say anymore.

Besides, he was getting all the information he needed through their sparkbond. Thundercracker was sad. That, more than anything, was upsetting. He was sad, and he didn’t feel good. After being at war for so long, Skywarp wasn’t wholly surprised. Most of TC’s mornings seemed to start out like this, and Skywarp’s efforts at cheering him up were begining to falter as the war dragged on and the Nemesis remained trapped at the bottom of Earth’s sea.

But it didn’t matter. Skywarp would keep trying. The trine came first.

Skywarp was already asking questions before TC had finished lowering his firewalls. ‘ _You okay, TC? They’re not hurting you, are they? I’ll kill ‘em if they’ve laid so much as a finger on you. They won’t know what hit ‘em either, those - ’_

_‘Warp, I’m fine,’_ TC immediately assured him, that strong soothing presence coming over across their sparkbond. _‘They haven’t touched me. I was just...I was thinking about the Vosian Academy again.’_

Disgust and the shadow of old-young anxieties skittered down his neck at the mention of their first home, and Skywarp pinched it down before it could become a Real Emotion and send his vision soft with static. He scoffed instead, letting irritation through, because irritation was safe. _‘Dunno why you bother with that place, it was worse than the Pit.’_

_‘I think it was alright,’_ TC said to him, sending warmth and fondness from his spark. _‘We met there. I met you. It wasn’t all bad.’_

Skywarp let his optics dim as he stood in that warmth, feeling all his subroutines slow marginally and the lines-vectors-numbers-angles vibrating through his teeth pause. It was good. _‘TC, you and Star were the only good things about that place.’_

TC chuckled over their bond. _‘You know it’s bad when you think_ **_Starscream_ ** _is worthy of higher praise than our old school.’_ There was only fondness in TC’s spark, but Skywarp thought of the figure sprawled on the couch and felt his own spark clench uncomfortably as his conflicted emotions started swirling around again.

TC must have sensed that - because he always did - and asked _‘Speaking of...where_ **_is_ ** _Screamer?’_

_‘He’s asleep. He had a...long night.’_

There was a small pause as the words sank in.

_‘Ah.’_ Discomfort and guilt bled over from Thundercracker’s end of the bond. _‘Are they worse than usual, or the same?’_

As if the, as if -- Skywarp clenched his fists in frustration. Starscream shouldn’t be getting hurt at all, he wanted to say. The severity of the wounds wasn’t where the line should be drawn, it was getting them in the first place -- it was wrong, it felt _wrong_ , but nobody wanted to talk about it and TC and Starscream had just both...accepted it. As if keeping their silence and Not Talking About It would keep Skywarp from noticing Starscream’s increasing collection of injuries. He’d noticed. He just couldn’t figure out how to tell them that, and it _killed him_.

But he didn’t say that to TC. Instead, he said, ‘ _Normal. Didn’t hear him come in last night, but he’s not curled up all small on the couch. He’s taking it all up, so he can’t be hurting_ **_that_ ** _bad._ ’

TC sighed like he wasn’t satisfied with that. He kept his thoughts hidden behind firewalls - he’d gotten better over the millennia, they all had - but Skywarp managed to catch an errant word: _‘Why?’_

‘ _Why what. Why_ **_nothing_ ** ,’ Skywarp shot back, some of the bitterness bleeding through. _‘I don’t care_ **_why_ ** _he’s not more messed up than he could be. Just s’long as he isn’t.’_

TC’s firewall wavered, letting through the usual cocktail of horror, fear, guilt, pity, regret, and anger whenever he heard about the damage Starscream incurred during his “Secret Missions,” the clever euphemism for _bullshit_ name TC and Starscream were using to handwave the injuries. Skywarp sighed and sent over a pulse of comfort.

Another pause as TC gathered his thoughts. _‘Warp,’_ he said slowly, _‘do you think Megatron knows that Starscream is planning something?’_

_‘How could he?’_

_‘He’s smart like that, Warp. You’ve got the space thing, Starscream has the science thing, and Megatron_ _has this...this thing with playing games. Anybody tries to outmaneuver him, to play him, and he shuts it down, figures it out immediately. Guy can smell a strategy from a klik off.’_

Skywarp rubbed his faceplates. Thinking about Megatron, thinking about getting _caught_ -[about his trine members getting caught, getting punished, getting k--] was about as appealing as stripping out the wires of his own optics, but TC, in the boredom of captivity, had apparently decided the best thing to do this morning was some loud, quality fretting.

_‘The smart thing to do if you know Starscream is up to something is to put a stop to it,’_ TC started, unease washing down the bond in waves. ‘ _But Megatron hasn’t done anything. Usually when he starts plotting, Starscream can’t even get the plan in motion, since Megatron’s, like, four step ahead of everybody. But he hasn’t done anything this time, it’s - it’s weird.’_

_‘So he must not know something’s up then,’_ Skywarp said absently, putting away the empty cubes to be reused later. He didn’t care about this conversation anymore, but he was humoring TC.

_‘The way I see it, Megatron likes the game too much.’_

And _you_ like analyzing him too much, Skywarp thought, but he kept that one to himself, and focused instead on pouring an inadvisable amount of sweeteners into the first cube he’d be conscious enough to actually enjoy.  

_‘He likes watching Starscream running around trying to off him,’_ TC continued. _‘And he just_ loves _thwarting him at the last second. And as messed up as_ **_Starscream_ ** _is, he probably_ likes _getting thwarted.’_

As though they were hearing him through a tunnel, Starscream’s mental voice slurred into the bond. _‘Stop talkin’ ‘bout me like m’not here.’_

_‘Morning, sunshine,’_ Thundercracker greeted dryly, and Starscream responded with the mental equivalent of a rude gesture.

Skywarp watched as Starscream left the couch and stumbled into their bedroom, catching the end of a wing on the doorframe and cursing under his breath. Energon from ruptured tubules dripped down along the underside of the wing onto the floor, and under the dull lights of the bedroom, Skywarp could see the dents scattered around the base where Starscream’s wings connected to the rest of his body, as if somebody had pinned him down. Static flickered behind Skywarp’s optics and he offlined them for a brief second. Murder would get him nowhere.

Starscream managed to knock over a pile of datapads, stumble into a chair, topple a stack of empty energizer cans, and smack his helm with the door of a cabinet in his half-conscious search for an energon cube. Skywarp followed behind, obsessively straightening everything out of habit and keeping an eye on Starscream out of worry. Half of Starscream’s winces, he knew, had less to do with any morning gracelessness and more to do with the scrapes littering his frame. For his part, Skywarp said nothing. Bringing it up would just lead to shouting.

_‘Make him drink some energon_ ,’ Thundercracker reminded Skywarp.

_‘’Course, TC,’_ Skywarp replied, tired and automatic, just as Starscream snapped _‘I don’t need you two telling me to refuel!’_ Skywarp ignored him, walked over to the cooler built into the wall of their suite where they kept their private stash of energon, pulled out a chilled cube, and shoved it into Starscream’s scuffed hands. Once Starscream started drinking - and Skywarp was reasonably sure nobody was going to combust, pass out, or die - he left the dim comfort of their bedroom, crossed the cramped sitting room where they took their meals and fought over the couch, passed through the tiny receiving area where the rest of the armada held meetings with the trine elite of the Decepticon air force, and stepped outside their suite into the hallway.

He had duties to perform. Particularly now that TC wasn’t there.

His day was mundane and routine. Things were quiet. He made several passable attempts at small talk with various people, did boring, TC-esque things, and made the effort to look as busy and unapproachable as possible. Every once in awhile - when a fellow seeker asked something too specific to lie about easily, or when Soundwave’s thrice-damned head appeared in his line of sight - he’d ask for TC’s input, which TC promptly gave. His bonded was watching, always, even in the still moments. It filled Skywarp with a sense of relief - watchfulness coupled with little input was good. It meant he was doing well enough to warrant few corrections, that TC _approved_.

Skywarp was on the bridge, standing at attention while Megatron looked over a status report on the Seeker Armada, when TC asked Starscream, _‘When is this happening?’_

_‘Tomorrow,’_ was the reply.

_‘So Megatron’s plans are on schedule, then?’_

“Thank you, Skywarp,” Megatron said, dismissing (and startling) him. Skywarp took the datapad, gave a slight bow, and trotted back down the halls as he listened in on his trine.

_‘Ahead of schedule, actually. Not that I’m going to tell_ **_him_ ** _that until it becomes relevant. Wouldn’t want him to get used to all the efficiency around here, the despicable fuck.’_

_‘You’re lucky he’s not in our heads right now,’_ Thundercracker warned.

A scoff. _‘Have you forgotten what a trinebond is, TC? What it’s for?’_

_‘I haven’t forgotten,’_ Thundercracker said dryly. _‘I have yet to see the merit of its original purpose, but I haven’t forgotten.’_ That elicited a laugh from Starscream. Thundercracker added _‘And Megatron may not be able to crack a trinebond, but he does have a certain telepath in his pocket...’_

_‘You worry too much, TC.’_

_‘If I do, it’s because you don’t worry_ **_enough_ ** _.’_ Skywarp had no idea where Soundwave was at the moment - the spymaster had disappeared after Rumble (or was it Frenzy?) when the little casseticon had run through the hallways shouting something with the words ‘bet’ and ‘paint bombs’ in it - but if there was anybody that could bypass the trinebond, it was Soundwave, so TC sounded, as always, remarkably sensible.

Starscream just snapped _‘Whatever,’_ and slammed down his firewalls, which meant that he was probably now pissed.

Skywarp vented, fans cycling steam. Everything would be fine, he told himself. After tomorrow, his trine would be whole again, and succeed or fail, the plan would be done. He wouldn’t have to worry about TC alone in that cell anymore. And everything, even Starscream’s neverending dents and all the secret-keeping and question-dodging and constant dismissals and condescension, all of it was bearable as long as they were all together.

Primus, but he hoped this worked.

**Author's Note:**

> [Nine here] Hey all! As you can see, part 2 is actually going up, finally! Unfortunately, things have also gotten a little complicated.
> 
> Here’s the thing. I started writing this fic from TC’s perspective with some scattered chapters from Starscream. And I had written almost all of it before I realized that part of why it was taking so long was because I hated it. I actually hated part 2. A lot of that came from the fact that so much of it was written from TC’s point of view. You see, there’s a lot of negative feelings on the way for the trine, and TC has this bad habit of dwelling on those feelings. That coupled with Starscream’s inability to talk about his feelings resulted in endless cycles of arguments that were more or less the same. And while those arguments were important to the narrative and were important to the development of important relationships, having to write out every single word of those arguments made writing part 2 hell for me. So I dropped it. I got busy, and jideni got busy. Neither of us had either the energy to fix it, or even the faintest idea of how to begin doing so.
> 
> The good news: When I stopped thinking about the fic, I figured out how part 2 needed to be written, and that was from Skywarp’s perspective. So now we have a fic on the way that I won’t hate.
> 
> The bad news: I had most of the fic written already before I realized this, so there’s going to have to be an almost total rewrite. That and the fact that jideni and I both tend to edit at a glacial pace means that the fic will still take a while to go up. It also means that I don’t as of yet have a schedule for posting.
> 
> The upshot of all of this is that while the fic will still likely be on hiatus, it will now be on active hiatus, rather than just gathering dust in my google drive. It also means that Jideni and I have had a lot more time to brainstorm and worldbuild, so part 2 will be exploring our ideas about seeker culture quite a bit more than we originally planned. As of writing this, I only have about a chapter and a half of part 2 done, and I’m already so much more invested in the story. Hopefully it will also be better for you guys than what I was originally trying to write.
> 
> That’s all of the Big News about the updating of the fic. I still have some things I want to say about the fic, but as far as knowing when it’s going to get posted is concerned, there’s nothing more to say about it.
> 
> Regarding Skywarp: he’s a unique perspective, with a unique voice, and a unique set of circumstances. As such, the writing is going to undergo some rather drastic stylistic changes in order to stay true to Skywarp as a narrator, and in some parts you might get treated to a never-ending run-on sentence, because, from Warp’s point of view, the whole world is all too often a run-on sentence. If things get busy in his head and you find yourself asking, “what Squawks the birdman?” just shoot us a message and we’ll clarify or fix it. It’s our first time experimenting with such a meandering style, and our first time applying it to Skywarp for anything longer than a paragraph or two, so we’re open to input and critique.


End file.
